How Not To Buy Crap Games This Season

The Guardian Gamesblog has a short guide on avoiding bad games and helping the games industry. From the article: "Say no to film and TV tie-ins - These are generally belted out in nine months by newcomers treated little better than sweatshop workers. If you're fed the line, 'the director was fully involved in the making of this game', beware. This means, roughly, 'The director sent his lawyers to the studio with a 300-page guide, warning that if it were breached, the team would be shot.'"

Comments

Film and Movie Tie-ins

[csbrooks]

Even though Spiderman 2 and The Incredible Hulk were both really awesome games? This sounds like crummy advice.

Here's what I do: never buy a game until you're read some good reviews. NOT previews, which are always suspiciously glowing. After getting burned buying a few $50 games the first day they came out, I stick hard and fast to this rule.

Even then sometimes I wait a year or so until they're $20 at Wal-mart.

Re:Film and Movie Tie-ins

[bradbeattie]

'Course, you could always wait a year until after the release date. By then the marketing department is done flooding the market with biased previews and reviews, the price has dropped from ~$60 to ~$30 and the biggest patches the game will receive have been released. With that in mind, is there any reason to buy a game on its release date?

Re:Film and Movie Tie-ins

[badasscat]

What do you think about http://www.gamerankings.com/?

Everybody knows about gamerankings.com and I think a lot of people put too much stock in them.

The problem is review scores - even aggregated ones - tell you nothing. Reviewers often get so caught up in hype themselves that they can't (or won't) see a game's faults, and of course there's the issue of paid advertising at almost every publication. That's not to say reviews themselves are useless, but just looking at a score - even an average of the scores from a bunch of publications - is not going to tell you anything.

But for some of the same reasons, simply reading one or two reviews is not going to help you either. What you need to do is read between the lines when you read these reviews. Ask yourself "what is this reviewer not telling me about this game?"

For example, before I bought NFL 2K5, I read a bunch of reviews about it. None of them spent more than a couple sentences talking about the franchise mode, which is the main mode I play in every sports game I buy. If they said anything, it was just about it being more "fleshed out" than the year before. Still, they all said the core gameplay was great, so I bought the game. Sure enough, franchise mode was so buggy that it was literally impossible to play more than a couple seasons of it (destroying the whole point of that mode). The developer forums were flush with complaints about numerous game-stopping bugs, several of which I personally encountered pretty quickly, but none of which were mentioned in any review I read.

Obviously, these reviewers simply hadn't played that mode. They looked at the options and assumed they knew how it worked and that was enough for them. I should have known better, because not a single one of these reviews mentioned anything about playing more than a couple games in franchise mode.

It's not just about bugs, though. Reviewers are paid to review what's there, not what's not there. Ask yourself what you're expecting out of a game and whether the reviews you're reading are speaking directly to those wants or not. If you're looking for an adventure game and you find a game you think you might be interested in but the reviewers just talk about how much fun it is to shoot zombies, then even if the game gets a high score, it's probably not for you.

Beyond that, though, there is definitely real corruption in game journalism, whether intentional or not. I think a lot of it is actually not intentional; reviewers get wooed and wowed by big publishers with trips and gifts and whatnot, and all the while the publisher hammers into their heads how big a particular game is going to be, how awesome it is, how everybody's looking forward to it. Eventually it becomes a self-fulfilling thing, and you see more preview coverage and more hype. The press themselves buy into it. The game comes out and in order to justify themselves, all of the press gives it a ridiculously high score. Look at a game like The Legend of Zelda: the Wind Waker, which even Shigeru Miyamoto now calls "boring" and basically unfinished. But it has a score of 94.9% on GameRankings, because the press bought the hype that they themselves helped create.

So my point is you cannot rely on scores (even aggregate ones) and you cannot rely solely on "sound bites" culled from reviews. You need to read reviews carefully and think about why reviewers say certain things and why they are not saying other things. Basically, just use some critical thinking skills - skills that a lot of game reviewers lack.

Re:Film and Movie Tie-ins

[edwdig]

Look at a game like The Legend of Zelda: the Wind Waker, which even Shigeru Miyamoto now calls "boring" and basically unfinished. But it has a score of 94.9% on GameRankings, because the press bought the hype that they themselves helped create.

Miyamoto did not say Wind Waker is boring. He said the triforce hunt section of the game was boring. He did have a list of things he would do differently if he had more time to work on the game, but every game designer has a list like that for every game they have ever worked on.

The triforce hunt does get boring, but it's not that big a section of the game. The only other significant flaw in the game is that you have to get pretty far into the game before the enemies do a significant amount of damage to you, which means that once you get a couple hearts you pretty much can't die unless you're trying to. Despite the claims of the people who only played Ocarina of Time, the graphics fit in with the style of the rest of the series perfectly and are very well done. Quite honestly, if the development team had another 3 months or so to work on the game, it probably would have easily topped Ocarina of Time. In the end, it definitely is one of the better games in the series.

Counter examples

[2008]

Say no to film and TV tie-ins:
Tie Fighter, Chronicles of Riddick

Avoid gangster adventures:
GTA (OK, maybe they meant to exclude that themselves)

The second world war is over:
Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory - maybe not an incredible game but it's great value.

Try an original title:
Many of these suck too...

Download an independent game:
Most people seem to think Darwinia isn't much fun to play. Certainly there are plenty of awful flash games.

terrible games based on cartoons:
Astro Boy (GBA). It's by Treasure!

A Bit Sexist Are We?

[Xarius]

Now, I understand what they are saying here, but why the inclusion specifically of the black young man holding a shotgun? I suppose if the same game featured a young white inner-city youth roaming the mean streets, or a latino kid, the game would be ok to pick up and enjoy?

I like the way that you use selective political-correctness to try and accuse them of being racist, yet you completely disregard the fact that they also said man.

I suppose if the same game featured a woman, the game would be ok to pick up and enjoy?

The specific inclusion of a specific gender into their "bad games" definition is a bit much, IMO.

(Please note the use of sarcasm here, just to point out the article was no more racist than it was sexist)

Story icon coincidence?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

It looks as if there is a Christmas tree perched on an Atari joystick.

Metacritic.com is where I shop first

[toddlg]

Metacritic games is where I visit first.

Prettymuch if a game has an 85+ rating on here it's not going to be a total lemon.

Just last week I was talking with our facilities manager who was lamenting he hadn't played any games on the Xbox lately, but was wanting to get some more FPS and didn't know which games were any good.

We went to metacritic, used the advanced search, and printed off a list of the top 25 FPS for Xbox, stopped by Gamestop at lunch and he picked up 3 highly rated games.

Indie Games

[the phantom]

The article mentions indie games, but fails to mention one of the greatest draws -- they are also generally cheap (or at least cheaper than the standard $50 per game of most large releases).

Mutant Storm is a brilliant arcade style game that combines old school frenzy with purty graphics. It is nice to see that folk are still making games like this (now, if I could find a decent platformer -- the last good game in that genre was Castlevania: Symphony of the Night). Not only is Mutant Storm a great game, but it costs less $20.

Darwinia is another wonderful game. Sure, it is a bit short (10 levels, less than 10 hours if you go through it at a reasonable pace), but some of the best games ever were rather short (Sonic the Hedgehog is still one of my favorite games, and can be beaten less than an hour -- two hours if you take your time). Add to this that Darwinia has a very different set of aesthetics from most modern games (rather than realistic graphics, Darwinia seeks to produce a very clean, artificial look, something like the movie Tron), an interesting interface, and a compelling story. Price: $30.

I know that both of these were briefly mentioned in the article, but I thought that they both deserved a bit more praise.

What about Shotgun Gaming?

[Demon-Xanth]

I've done this in the past:

Instead of buying one $50 game, buy 5-10 $5-10 games. You know, games that are a year old, on clearance, etc... Sometimes you find a good game that you otherwise would have overlooked.

If 80% of those games aren't worth playing, you still end up with one that is.

Look used.
GT4: $50
GT3 (used): $6
Will you have 700% more fun w/ GT4 over GT3?

That's not to say don't buy the $50 game. After all, many are well worth it. (ie: Shadow of the Colossus)

how to not buy crap games

[davez0r]

two options:

1. don't buy games
2. go to http://www.gamerankings.com/ and don't buy anything that gets lower than 90%.

this isn't rocket science, come on.

Terrible way to choose a game

[brkello]

This "article" reads like it was written by someone who reads the daily gripes about games on Slashdot. They really are guilty of generalizing specific game categories rather than helping anyone find good games. There are good games out there with movie tie-ins. There are great games that take place in WWII now matter how tired they are of it. Independant games are not magically good. Non-Sequels can be terrible. Now, if they said "A large number of games with movie tie-ins are very very bad. There are many exceptions though. Do some research on a title online first and see how people rate it. Check multiple sources." Actually, that's the advice I would give on any game. That article doesn't do much to actually help you. You'd get more out of going to gamefaqs.